Cathy Holloway Hill – canada.comhttp://o.canada.com
Canada's great, shareable storiesFri, 09 Dec 2016 15:29:00 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://1.gravatar.com/blavatar/15edae77ebfa450ee5bb897103fdef31?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngCathy Holloway Hill – canada.comhttp://o.canada.com
Relationships: Lying is bad (or is it?)http://o.canada.com/news/relationships-lying-is-bad-or-is-it
http://o.canada.com/news/relationships-lying-is-bad-or-is-it#commentsThu, 15 Nov 2012 14:20:33 +0000http://o.canada.com/?p=150536]]>“Relationships are ruined every day because of lies,” says Cathy Holloway Hill, author of “Lies, Love and Life.” She must be reading about the Petraeus sex scandal. I won’t recount it here because Jon Stewart doing too good of a job of it but suffice it to say, the General got pretty specific with his…ugh I can’t. It’s all been said. I am not that shocked. CIA people are still people, and genitals are just genitals, even if they are attached to people running the CIA. Plus, working for the CIA means having to lie for a living. Really, working anywhere means having to lie a little: “I would be happy to put that report together for you, boss!”

Lies.

I think it’s interesting how this Petraeus scandal involves work and sex. Because this is literally all my friends and I talk about. What is stressing us out about our work lives, what is stressing us out about our sex lives. Because we like to think of these things as being totally separate but, it’s all interrelated. I met a life coach at a party last weekend and I asked her what people come to see about. Relationships, jobs, family? She said “All of the above. Because it’s all related.” And we lie to ourselves in every part of this equation. But how do we know when our lies have crossed over from being little and harmless to being big and bad?

Holloway Hill has a three-question test to see if you might be lying to yourself too much about work, or love:

1. Have you ever told yourself “I will never find true love?” According to Holloway Hill, no matter how illogical this statement seems, people persist in believing it.

Listen, I log in to Facebook every Monday morning and I am greeted with a stream of wedding pictures. Now, I know a wedding doesn’t necessarily mean “true love,” whatever “true love” means, but it at least means two people found each other. And if people on Facebook who post pictures of every single meal we eat along with comments like “Grrrr my Blackberry is broken!!!” I promise you, you can, too.

2. Do you pretend to be happy when you’re not?

Again, this can be useful. Sometimes, you have to fake it until you make it. But if you are ever going to let people in, they have to be able to see that you can be vulnerable, that you can be sad. And, no matter how good of an actor you think you are, you’re not. People can tell. I was shocked when a friend I’d known since high school told me she always knew I wasn’t as happy as I tried to make myself seem behind all my jokes and silliness. I was shocked and embarrassed. Shocked that she had seen through me and embarrassed that I had had the presumption to think I was putting one over on everyone. I wasn’t. And neither are you.

3. Do you hate your job but think you’ll never find a better one?

This is the danger of a difficult economy. Too many people think, and tell each other, that we’re lucky just to have jobs. If you have a job you hate, this is in no way helpful. And it is possible to acknowledge that you are happy to have your job but that you might want more. Sometimes, a job can be like that terrible boyfriend who tells you that you’ll never leave him because no one else will ever want you. After a while, you start to believe it. But there are good boyfriends out there, and good jobs too, and finding out what’s right for you in both arenas takes work. You have to be honest enough with yourself to understand what you are passionate about in work and in love. Following your passion in work can make you a success. But giving in to passion at work can lead to tendering your resignation to newly-elected President Barack Obama. And no one wants to do that. So be honest with yourself. And be honest in this poll: